Thursday, June 12, 2008

2008 - A Squid Odyssey

I will go ahead and apologize (although it may be too late already) for the terrible story and the pathetic attempts at undersea humor. I'm Sorry. I'm so sorry...

Once upon a time in St. Lucia, there was a squid. We'll call him Squiddy for lack of any other creative name that isn't copyrighted by Spongebob Squarepants.

Squiddy led a happy life swimming about the reef. Things were simple. The water was warm. Food was easy to find. In total, life was good.

One day his Mom swam up and said that he would have to go to the Squid Academy. He didn’t want to go, he just wanted to play all day with his friends on the reef. He told his mother his feelings toward going to school and learning to read and write, but his mother sternly said that he would have to. “It may save your life one day!” she told him.

Naturally he didn’t believe her, but he wasn’t old enough to join the Barnacle & Baleen Circus and hadn’t practiced enough to get signed by the Squirts, which were his favorite Pro-Synchronized Swimming team, so he resigned himself to going to school.

Then one fateful day, Squiddy was out playing and saw a tempting morsel of food hanging from a hook. Now being that he was young, had a brain smaller than a pea, and hungry, he grabbed it and thought immediately, “Uh Oh…”

Whoosh! Up he went to the surface!

Terrified, he was dumped unceremoniously into a bucket with several other squid, and little did they know they were destined for an Italian restaurant. He wondered, as much as a squid is capable of wondering, how he was going to get out of this.

At last he formulated a plan. It had little chance of working, but at least he had a plan. He would try to stay away from the chef’s knife whenever the waitress yelled for an order of Calamari.

In the coming days, he found his true talent, and that was evading the chef's hand when he reached into the bucket to fetch the main ingredient of this horrific calamari. He managed to avoid the chef to the point of annoying him. When the Chef finally got a hand on him and tried to turn him into a good appetizer, the Chef ended up cutting his own finger.

Grumbling under his breath, the Chef turned his back and went to tend to his cut finger.

Squiddy seized the moment and squirmed, wiggled, flipped, and flopped onto the only thing he had ever seen leave the kitchen in the hopes that he would have a chance to jump into the ocean. It was a plate. He wiggled up under some vegetables in an attempt to hide until the right moment for his jump over the rail and into the sea. After a few moments of hiding in the vegetable medley, he realized that he couldn’t hold what little water he had left in his gills much longer. Hurriedly, he spelled out a message to the restaurant patrons. All the while, he thanked his mother for insisting that he go to Squid Academy instead of trying out for amateur synchronized swimming teams.

What was that message you might ask?


Well??? What else would a squid spell from vegetables?

The waitress, realizing what was happening as she set the plate before a customer, who was suffering from a somewhat excessive fit of laughing, snatched up the little squid, and flung him far into the ocean.

Squiddy is now a Senior Fellow at the Squid Academy, and heads up many Out-Tentacle Programs to get inner-reef squid to attend school instead of falling into the trap of doing synchronized swimming.

Ouch...if you thought that post was painful to read, imagine typing it...

2 comments:

Marcus said...

Brad,

You are Nuts!

Was this a bedtime story that you made up and felt compelled to share?

TLC Mom said...

Hilarious! As an avid Spongebob fan, I'm glad to know Squidward made it back to the sea... the show just wouldn't be the same without him. Wow, a vacation without kids... dare to dream! ~Meghan